interview

Jul 4, 2011 - in-house training has proven to be a real boon. ... manufacturing process, in-house training lets us ... man all our workshops as required in ...
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human ressources

Boosting growth through training lt’s becoming common to say that there is a shortage of employees qualified in composites. But, it is not the only and main reason to adopt in-house trainning...

Our current training capacity is for 6 lay-up operators simultaneously. This then allows us to rapidly man all our workshops as required in order to react as quickly as possible to the demands of our mainline customers. By making the site more dynamic in this way, we are able to cater to urgent customer needs while at the same time injecting diversity into the daily routines of our employees.

interview

By LAURENT MAHÉ, DUQUEINE ATLANTIQUE SITE

HEAD OF THE

Why create your own training school? L AURENT M AHÉ : The specific features of the sector can only be understood in a production workshop. Training alone could not guarantee a compliance level that would allow us to obtain manufacturing costs in line with the requirements of our customers. By assuming control of our own manufacturing process, in-house training lets us place particular emphasis on the cost of scrap, so that the employees are made fully aware of the issue. The only protection against the massive offshoring of our businesses is daily hard work. It is not uncommon in the field of composites for the price of the material alone to represent 50% of the final cost of the part. In this case, offshoring is of no interest since the materials

component is far more expensive than the labour costs. Today, only the quality of our parts and our perfect control of the delivery deadlines allow us to remain competitive when faced with low-cost countries. Training that focuses on quality and costs and which is conducted within a manufacturing company itself is the best way to make newlytrained lay-up operators aware of these issues. With growth in excess of 45% on the Malville site in the first quarter of 2011, in-house training has proven to be a real boon. JCM: What are the real gains in the workshop? L.M. : The first gain comes from leveraging added value from the technicians who are given the responsibility of training the new employees.

JCM: What are the keys to the success of this inhouse training? L.M. : In the first instance, we need to manage the teams on a daily basis – proximity is a key linchpin for ensuring that this initiative succeeds. Added to that is the dynamic of the "ideas box" which allows us to select a dozen or so improvements every month. The employees are then provided a forum in our inhouse journal in order to explain clearly how just they perceive the issues connected with production. A training school within a genuine manufacturing company offers all kinds of advantages in terms of innovation and progress. The levels achieved in our lay-up rooms today encourage us to pursue the development of this new way of working together. "Students" and "teachers" are able to discover and optimise their qualities through daily

reflection, thereby improving the productivity of the company while preparing our new generation of technicians for the future. The best of them now succeed in being inducted into one of our "Product methods" departments, which monitor daily all the journeymen in the workshop in order to report any dysfunction and to ensure by means of brainstorming that the collective know-how of Duqueine Atlantique is capitalized upon. Today, we train all our lay-up operators along with our CNC operators in an industrial environment. JCM: Is this training school reserved for your own development? L.M. : No, far from it. Clearly, all our structures are now faced with training issues. We can open up this school to our own customers in order to provide a talent pipeline for the entire region of north-west France. This is, indeed, our short-term objective. It will allow our customers to enjoy wider freedom of choice when faced with changes in the manufacturing workload: they could use our structure in the framework of subcontracting or take on journeymen from this regional pipeline of qualified employees. The objective is that our customers should never find themselves at a loss with regard to production capacity. More information : www.duqueine.fr

No66 July - August 2011 / jec composites magazine

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